Exhibitions

HIGHLIGHTS: 26. January - 09. March 2019

HIGHLIGHTS

"Each idea seeks a form and a medium to become reality through perception.
To participate in this process and to combine art and life,
the HEITSCH GALLERY understands as its task." // Joerg Heitsch

Jörg Heitsch is pleased to present the highlights of international artists' positions on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the HEITSCH GALLERY, from minimalist and concrete to figurative painting, sculpture and video.

From the 25th of January we will present you the best of 25 years of gallery history in the exhibition HIGHLIGHTS. Look forward to large-format works by Udo Nöger, Angela Glajcar and Dirk Salz, exclusive digital art works by Moto Waganari and many more highlights. As a special feature, we present new video installations by Swiss artist MARCK and the digital model worlds by Matthias Zimmermann, which can be seen in the Heitsch Gallery for the first time.

Artists of the exhibition

Jim Avignon

All-round artist Jim Avignon is internationally renowned as a painter, musician, performance-artist and writer. His naive cartoon style is deceiving - with a touch of irony he questions our capitalistic globalised world. His fast and low priced mass production sabotages the strategies of the art market and disapproves of financial speculation. Although Avignon is long since considered an iconic figure in the Berlin art- and music scene he still manages to cross the boundaries of mainstream and underground.

Rudolf Burda

The Czech artist Rudolf Burda is fascinated by glass and is professionally engaged in the creation of glass objects and sculptures.
“The greatest inspiration for me is the universe that is fulfilling my life’s credo of being the energy of the big bang, which has neither beginning nor ending. In my creativity, I’m following minimalistic legacy and I am searching for the ideal and pure form, which is perceived as “gestalt” – “an organized whole”. My aim is to contribute to the preservation of the old tradition of hand-blown glass together with developing and perfecting it. I hope to evoke in a viewer understanding of time and space, formed from a continuous flow of energy, which reflects all reality but at the same time, it creates and it swallows. In my works, I preserve the old tradition of hand-blown glass and on the other side, I am aimed to represent a new concept of layered glass and unique aesthetics of material.“

Marco Casentini

Marco Casentini explores in his work spatial dynamics of color, texture and shape. He is inspired by designs of urban space and reflects geometrical and architectural questions. By decoding environments and urban structures that he perceives immediately, he deconstructs and interprets designs of architects, engineers and town planners. Casentinis use of radiant, bright or strong colors is stimulated by southern Californian or Mexican paintings of houses and dematerializes their architectural surfaces.

Marc Fromm

Marc Fromm‘s carved reliefs and sculptures refelct the values of our every day culture. The artist introduces contemporary topics using the elaborate techniques of old mastery wood craft. Traditional religious altar scenes are reinterpreted as modern billboards just like former religious assurance is replaced by the promised land of advertising. Marc Fromm reveals the stereotypes of the advertisement industry and unmasks the fake glamour of today‘s commercialized products.

Angela Glajcar

Angela Glajcar's paper sculptures mostly hang, floating in the air. They seem light and delicate, however they show a strong sculptural presence. Terforation is the title of Angela Glajcar's cubic pieces. The staggered arrangement of the vertically hung series of sheets of white paper, with torn edges, produces cave-like recessions. These extend into the depth of the sculpture. The sharp ridges and deep caverns evoke associations with glacial or rock formations while light and shadow fall on the surface of the sheets, enlivening the interior of the oblong structure. The viewer is led into fascinating rooms of harmony and silence.

Christiane Grimm

Christiane Grimm creates objects with different layers of glass and other materials which are arranged in such a manner, that the incoming light creates an almost holographic effect. Grimm experiments with the potential of color and with the brightening in subtle transitions. They are poetic constructs and illusionistic architectures out of clear, seemingly floating plains – achromatic and chromatic. The arrangement of the different elements makes it hardly possible to locate them perspectively within space. Moreover there are irritating optical effects which make it even more difficult to grasp Grimm's artworks which can be located somewhere between painting, sculpture and architecture.

Roland Helmer

Since the 60s, Roland Helmer develops his constructive and concrete work with the utmost consequence. His abstract-geometric early work shows clear forms, quiet areas and is limited to a maximum of 7 or 8 bright colors. The variety of shapes is reduced in later work on narrow and wide lines in a vertical and horizontal screen layout. The color palette expands on certain issues by blends and underpainting with white and black. In painting concrete and constructive, he is one of those designers who bring a personal picture as part of an imaging system.

Jessus Hernandez

Jessus Hernandez lives and works in Southern California. He is a self-taught artist drawing inspiration from the diversity that abounds. Architecture and nature converge in his creations where he infuses vibrant color, linear form, dimension, light, and space to create geometric abstract art forms in a vast array of superimposed perspectives. Always intrigued with the placement of shapes and lines in cityscapes, he developed a love for architectural design which became the foundation for his artistic visions.

Roman Klonek

Roman Klonek is known to be of the leading artists in the German graphic arts scene. As a student he worked on his first wood cut and can't get off it ever since. His humorous prints depict colourful, imaginary landscapes filled with bizarre characters. Exotic letterings all over the image arouse even more questions instead of helping us to decipher the unusual scenes. By now Klonek has created his very own fancyful cosmos of odd creatures all being inspired by the Eastern European cartoons of his childhood.

Marck

The video sculptures by Swiss artist MARCK are more than a simple combination of video and sculpture: They are a logic consequence of his extensive examination with films and videos, multimedia based projects, performances, music and sculptural as well as kinetic objects. The examination of humans and their world of feelings is central to MARCK's oeuvre.

Antonio Marra

Antonio Marra’s abstract works remain truly fascinating due to their surprising change of form and colour. Each of his multi-perspective paintings contains several more pictures which reveal themselves by circling around the canvas. Step by step the spectator is drawn into a vivid and dynamic kaleidoscope of shape and colour. Marra’s art is a surprising experience of unique visual and dimensional effects. This painter has come to his very own style reflecting and redefining the techniques of Op-art and Orphism.

Medardus

Medardus developes his painting cycles by searching for clues in the past. For his oil paintings the artist combines motives of historical paintings or photographs with his own picture imaginations and creatures as well as with contemporary topics such as technology or aerospace. Medardus creates ambivalent, strange visual spaces, in which humans, animals and machines merge to timeless views. The artist lives and works in Switzerland.

Yoshiyuki Miura

Yoshiyuki Miura’s works may be considered a systematizing regulation to the omnipresent chaos. With his sculptures and installations the Japanese artist reflects the relation of space and time. He leads force and counterforce in order to bring them into balanced state of tension and release. Miura creates objects which play with our perception of three-dimensionality and intrigue us by their extraordinary simplicity, precision and beauty.

Udo Nöger

Udo Nöger attended Fachhochschule, Bielefeld University, and has studied in Paderborn, Berlin and Spain. Thanks to winning Nixdorf Grant, he spent some time in the early 90’s in New York, NY and Denver, CO.

Nöger aims to bring out the luminescence of paint in his practice. The artist is known for monochromatic gray works that give the impression of emitting light. Nöger achieves this effect by stretching multiple pieces of fabric or canvas onto one frame; he either paints on or cuts shapes into the different layers beforehand. As a result, the work appears lighter and more transparent in certain parts. Nöger has also been known to paint on the underside of the fabric, and to use materials of varying thickness and opacity.

Udo Nöger’s paintings, which appear at first glance to be gestural Abstract Expressionism transmuted to a subtle, luminous palette of pale silvery grays, whites and off-whites, change as the viewer moves in and out or changes the angle of view, as well as the level and quality of light falling on and reflected back from the works. The scumbled surfaces and tubular forms (which look airbrushed, but are not) change in sharpness (and thus implied depth) and even color. The wall color may be visible, and possibly also the floor; it’s difficult to decipher how these works operate. With their abstract illusionism perfectly calibrated, they’re spatially ambiguous.

Jürgen Paas

Jürgen Paas creates circles, rectangles, squares, cubes and translates them into an open painting system, which surveys individual aspects such as color, form and space. Here, he combines system and order with chance and regularity, which manifests itself in an extremely varied and sensuous material painting. Wall-painted, glued and assembled different-color figurations are in dialogue with the archive systems placed on them or on top of them, made of brackets, color plates or ribbons. The interplay of regular geometrical forms suggests a rhythmic spatial sound that, in the context of synesthetic perception, brings a polyphonic overall work of art into view.

Dirk Salz

Dirk Salz works on paintings whose most striking feature is their high-gloss surfaces. These are the result of the use of multi-layered epoxy resins coated with pigments and the sealing with polyurethane varnish. The images of Dirk Salz always aim at the experience of the temporality of the seeing. They demand an active viewer, who takes the time to move back and forth, back and forth, before the initially closing works, in order to open up their complexity so slowly. Reflection in this work is thus in two forms in the game: optically as the mirroring property of the picture surfaces, as a reflection-aesthetic as the reflection of the viewer on his own visual experience.

Slava Seidel

The magical compositions by the Russian painter Slava Seidel visualize a world shifting between truth and illusion. Her sepia-ink drawings depict surreal scenes in stupendous architectural settings which create a feeling of tension, vertigo and dynamic. The artist masters to depict even the most complex architectural structures in contortion - despite the challenging ink-technique which does not allow any later corrections. Seidel’s technical precision is just as remarkable as her imaginary gift which takes us to unknown, fantastic realities.

Stefan Szczesny

Stefan Szczesny, who became known in the 1980s as a protagonist of the Neue Wilde (New Wild) movement in painting, is now among Germany's most significant contemporary artists. Although he is primarily a painter, he also develops domains such as graphic design, sculpture, photography, stage design fashion and design. One very important area is his ceramic oeuvre, which comprises some 4000 works. Born in Munich, he lives and works in Saint Tropez, but also has a studio in Berlin.
The natural and cultural landscape that surrounds his chosen place of residence is a never-ending source of inspiration for Stefan Szczesny. Living in the midst of idyllic nature, with a view of the deep-blue sea and sun-flooded vineyards, Szczesny has developed the credo of a radical optimist: "The world is beautiful. Enjoy it with all your senses while you have the time to do so!"
The sensuality and joy, which are the direct result of Stefan Szczesny's close bond with nature, are major elements in all his works and are expressed in countless images of bliss on earth, full of purity and beauty of creation. His steel shadow sculptures are easily accessible: moving female nudes carrying fruits, which remind the spectator of Eve, the epitome of sensuality and symbol of paradise lost.

Henning von Gierke

The well-renowned Munich based artist Henning von Gierke has long since caught the attention of an international audience which has been intrigued by his realistic painting. In his works von Gierke questions our existence in the context of nature, religion and philosophy. His rich oeuvre consists of classic topics deriving from Greek mythology and Christianity just like portraits, still lifes or interiors. Not only as a painter but also as an opera-director and stage designer von Gierke is much asked for. For his film settings he has been awarded the highly respected „Deutscher Filmpreis“ in Gold and the „Silberner Bär“.

Moto Waganari

Moto Waganari creates transparent network-sculptures which outline a delicate body frame. By illuminating his sculptures the artists multiplies his three dimensional objects by a two dimensional shadow revealing the immaterial alter ego of every figure. His characters seem to visualize a surreal, parallel world filled with surprise and enigma. Moto Waganari’s sculptures seduce the spectator with their appealing beauty and sophisticated weightlessness.

Matthias A. K. Zimmermann

The model worlds of the Swiss painter and media artist Matthias A. K. Zimmermann reflect on and research the history of art, design and media. Elements and objects of the past and present form complex images borrowed from the Middle Ages, the Asian cultural area and the digital modern age. Zimmermann's creative process falls under the phrasing of artistic research. His model worlds distill the spatial composition of medieval panel paintings, examine the development of digital visual languages and fan out the levels of virtual spaces. Source code, computer game graphics, Japanese gardens, Buddhist symbolism and icon painting form a fascinating topology of space and time.